16 December 2023

Daily prayers in Advent with
Leonard Cohen and USPG:
(14) 16 December 2023

‘Here It Is’ was first recorded on ‘Ten New Songs’ (2001), Leonard Cohen’s tenth studio album

Patrick Comerford

We are in the countdown to Christmas in the Church, with just nine days to go to Christmas Day. Tomorrow is the Third Sunday of Advent or Gaudete Sunday (17 December 2023), bringing us two-thirds of the way through what is a very short Advent this year.

Throughout Advent this year, my reflections each day include a poem or song by Leonard Cohen. These Advent reflections are following this pattern:

1, A reflection on a poem or song by Leonard Cohen;

2, the Gospel reading of the day in the Church of England lectionary;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

‘Here is your cross, / Your nails and your hill; / And here is your love, / That lists where it will’ (Leonard Cohen) … Marc Chagall, ‘The White Crucifixion’ (1938)

The Songs and Poems of Leonard Cohen: 14, ‘Here It Is’:

‘Here It Is,’ a poem/song by Leonard Cohen, was first released 22 years ago on his tenth studio album, Ten New Songs, co-written and produced by Sharon Robinson and released in 2001.

I first used this poem in a Lenten setting when I was asked to preach at the Three Hours Devotions in Saint Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork, on Good Friday, 9 April 2004, by the then Dean Michael Burrows, now the Bishop of Tuam, Limerick and Killaloe.

This poem has the capacity to touch the reader or listener in painful places we are often too uncomfortable to search or reach.

Leonard Cohen himself once said: ‘It’s nice to write a catchy tune about death.’ But, while, some people may like poems that talk about blood, sweat and tears, I found out in Cork that Good Friday almost 20 years ago that many people are uncomfortable with some of the words in this poem.

Yet, surely, Christ must have suffered to this extreme of anxiety in Golgotha, and must have emptied himself completely of all human fluids on the cross on Calvary.

Who speaks in the poem?

Whose voice do we hear?

Who is singing?

Who narrates within the lyrics?

Is it God?

Is it just Leonard Cohen?

Is it his soul?

Does it really matter?

Some of those questions may be answered if we read this poem in the light of Advent as we prepare for Christmas or, more particularly, in Lent on the journey towards Good Friday and Easter.

Is this a legitimate way to read this poem? In his introduction to his Harvard lectures, The use of poetry and the use of criticism, TS Eliot wrote: ‘The poem’s existence is somewhere between the writer and the reader. It has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the writer is trying to ‘express’, or of his experiences of writing it, or of the experience of the reader, or of the writer as reader. Consequently the problem of what the poem ‘means’ is a good deal more difficult that it first appears … But a poem is not just either what the poet ‘planned’ or what the reader conceives, nor is its ‘use’ restricted to what the author intended or what it actually does for readers.’

Some commentators say the speaker in this poem by Leonard Cohen is God; others say the poet is speaking to himself at a point in life where death seems near, and he feels the need to collect his thoughts, recollect the past, and to face the future in truth.

And here is your love,
That lists where it will.


In this poem, God is taking an overview of a life and mixing in a bundle of opportunities in which a person has the opportunity to love. In each of these love/desire experiences, one has the opportunity to feel God’s presence.

In the first paired verses, 1 and 2, God is King of the universe and Lord of Creation, and he shows his majesty and his lordship through his love of all created things:

Here is your crown
And your seal and rings;
And here is your love
For all things.


In verse 2, the ‘cart’ is the human body in which Christ is incarnate and in which he moves around in God’s royal domain, the ‘cardboard’ the weak and flimsy body of his suffering, and the ‘piss’ the loss of all human life in his dying. In his life, suffering and death, he gives his all in love for all:

Here is your cart,
And your cardboard and piss;
And here is your love
For all of this.


In the second pair of verses, verses 3 and 4, the ‘wine’ in verse 3 may mean our thoughts and spiritual ideas. But I find resonances with the wine of the Last Supper and imagery that reminds me of Christ falling under the weight of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa, for the sake of his love for all:

Here is your wine,
And your drunken fall;
And here is your love.
Your love for it all
.

The ‘sickness’ in verse 4, may be the love we have for each other, a love that may keep us away from loving God, and therefore perhaps defined as a ‘sickness’ as it detracts us from our divine purpose, to ‘love God’ first and then to love others. The bed and the pan also echo the ‘piss’ in the second verse:

Here is your sickness.
Your bed and your pan;
And here is your love
For the woman, the man
.

In the four sets of two verses, the third line of each verse points to ways that we may love. But love is not mentioned in the third set of paired verses (5 and 6) – instead, we have the lines:

And here is the night,
The night has begun;
And here is your death
In the heart of your son.

And here is the dawn,
(Until death do us part);
And here is your death,
In your daughter’s heart.


Instead of love, he uses the word ‘death’ in the third lines of each of these two verses, emphasising the depth of love a parent feels for a child, and so the even deeper love God feels for us as his children in the death of Christ on the Cross.

Those verses reiterate the idea of the living and dying of every moment; the following of day with night, and night with day.

Night could represent ignorance and not knowing. But for mystics like Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila, who I have referred to in recent days, the night is also the beginning of the mystics’ journey towards communion and union with the Father, the ‘I Am Who Am.’ The Son must die in order for us to recognise his inherited unity with the Father.

Night turns to dawn with the resurrection, dawn is no longer night, the conscious is united with unconscious, night with day, and the soul with God.

In the last two paired verses, 7 and 8, he warns in verse 7 of ‘hurried’ desire and reminds us of how we hurry because we ‘long’ for something to be fulfilled, or over, or experienced. Instead, it is love on which everything is built and has its foundation:

And here you are hurried,
And here you are gone;
And here is the love,
That it’s all built upon.


In the final, closing verse (verse 8), the reference to Christ’s death, when he is nailed to the cross on the Hill of Calvary, becomes the summation of the poem:

Here is your cross,
Your nails and your hill;
And here is your love,
That lists where it will.


The word ‘lists’ in verse 8 may be a ‘list’ of objects, names or experiences. But to ‘list’ is also to listen, and also to ‘lean’ one way or the other, as when a boat leans to one side. Is he suggesting that our love may lean in different directions as time goes by, or that the love in each verse is different, listing or leaning in a different direction?

The refrain after each paired set of verses says:

May everyone live,
And may everyone die.
Hello, my love,
And my love, Goodbye.


We keep living and dying each moment. May we just do this.

‘Here is your crown / And your seal and rings’ (Leonard Cohen) … a Torah crown on display in the Jewish Museum in Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Leonard Cohen, Here It Is

Here is your crown
And your seal and rings;
And here is your love
For all things.

Here is your cart,
And your cardboard and piss;
And here is your love
For all of this.

May everyone live,
And may everyone die.
Hello, my love,
And my love, Goodbye.


Here is your wine,
And your drunken fall;
And here is your love.
Your love for it all.

Here is your sickness.
Your bed and your pan;
And here is your love
For the woman, the man.

May everyone live,
And may everyone die.
Hello, my love,
And, my love, Goodbye.


And here is the night,
The night has begun;
And here is your death
In the heart of your son.

And here is the dawn,
(Until death do us part);
And here is your death,
In your daughter’s heart.

May everyone live,
And may everyone die.
Hello, my love,
And, my love, Goodbye.


And here you are hurried,
And here you are gone;
And here is the love,
That it’s all built upon.

Here is your cross,
Your nails and your hill;
And here is your love,
That lists where it will

May everyone live,
And may everyone die.
Hello, my love,
And my love, Goodbye.


‘Here is your crown / And your seal and rings’ (Leonard Cohen) … a crown above hands in the priestly blessing on the grave of a cohen in Kraków (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Matthew 17: 10-13 (NRSVA):

10 And the disciples asked him, ‘Why, then, do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?’ 11 He replied, ‘Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things; 12 but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but they did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man is about to suffer at their hands.’ 13 Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist.

‘For John came neither eating nor drinking’ (Matthew 11: 19) … Saint John the Baptist depicted in a panel in a window in Saint Mary’s Church, Lichfield (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Today’s Prayers (Saturday 16 December 2023):

The theme this week in the new edition of ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), has been ‘The Faith of Advent.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (16 December 2023) invites us to pray in these words:

Thank you, God, that you have plans for us and they are for us to prosper and give us hope and a future. May your word to us be fulfilled.

The Collect:

O Lord, raise up, we pray, your power
and come among us,
and with great might succour us;
that whereas, through our sins and wickedness
we are grievously hindered
in running the race that is set before us,
your bountiful grace and mercy
may speedily help and deliver us;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
to whom with you and the Holy Spirit,
be honour and glory, now and for ever.

The Post-Communion Prayer:

Father in heaven,
who sent your Son to redeem the world
and will send him again to be our judge:
give us grace so to imitate him
in the humility and purity of his first coming
that, when he comes again,
we may be ready to greet him
with joyful love and firm faith;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Additional Collect:

Almighty God,
purify our hearts and minds,
that when your Son Jesus Christ comes again
as judge and saviour
we may be ready to receive him,
who is our Lord and our God.

Collect on the Eve of Advent 3:

O Lord Jesus Christ,
who at your first coming sent your messenger
to prepare your way before you:
grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries
may likewise so prepare and make ready your way
by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just,
that at your second coming to judge the world
we may be found an acceptable people in your sight;
for you are alive and reign with the Father
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Leonard Cohen on stage at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, in 2012 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Yesterday’s Reflection

Continued Tomorrow



‘Here It Is’ lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

‘Oscar Deutsch
Entertained Our
Nation’ – and also
rebuilt synagogues

The Odeon Cinema chain was founded in 1928 by Oscar Deutsch … was Odeon an acronym for ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation’? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

Ever since my childhood, I wondered why cinemas had names that evoked the classics. I was born across the street from the Classic Cinema on Rathfarnham Road and a few doors away from Terenure Synagogue. The proximity of those two landmark buildings led the members of the more salubrious Adelaide Road synagogue to jest in the 1950s and the 1960s about the ‘cinema-gogue.’

But, apart from the Classic Cinema in Terenure, other cinemas in Dublin with names that evoked the classics and classic theatre included the Corinthian and the Adelphi in the city centre, and (I suppose) the Stella in Rathmines, recently named one of the world’s 20 most beautiful cinemas.

For people who have grown up in England, the big cinema chain with a classically-inspired name was the Odeon Cinema chain founded in 1928 by Oscar Deutsch (1893-1941), and the London flagship cinema, the Odeon on Leicester Square, opening in 1937.

Words such as theatre, drama and tragedy are derived from Greek and the cultural life of classical Athens. The ancient Greek ᾨδεῖον (ōideion) means ‘a place for singing’, and the original Odeons were the popular but smaller amphitheatres of ancient Greece. They include the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, built on the south slopes of the Acropolis in 161 CE by Herodes Atticus and today it remains the premiere showcase for the performing arts in Athens.

The Odeon or Theatre of Herodes Atticus on the southern slopes of the Acropolis (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The name Odeon had been appropriated by cinemas in France and Italy by the 1920s. Mel Mindelsohn, a grocery shop owner who was an early business partner of Otto Deutsch, suggested using the name Odeon after spotting it in Tunis. Years later, however, it was suggested the name Odeon was an abbreviation of ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains our Nation’.

Oscar Deutsch made the name his own in cinemas throughout Britain, so much so that people claimed the word Odeon was an acronym for ‘Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation.’

Oscar Deutsch was born in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, on 12 August 1893, the son of Leopold Deutsch, a successful Hungarian Jewish scrap metal merchant. Leopold came to England from Hungary in the 1900s with his wife Leah Cohen, a Jewish emigrant from Poland. He went into business with his cousin, Adolph Brenner, and Deutsch & Brenner went on to have a number of strip metal factories and rolling mills.

After attending King Edward VI Five Ways Grammar School, Oscar began working at his father’s metal firm in Birmingham. In 1925, He rented his first cinemas in Wolverhampton and Coventry in 1925 and started exhibiting subsequent runs of films. Then, in 1928, he opened his first cinema in Brierley Hill, Dudley.

Oscar Deutsch had 26 Odeons by 1933 and ‘Odeon’ was fast becoming a household word, used interchangeably with ‘cinema’ in some parts of England until after World War II.

The Odeon on Tottenham Court Road, London … Odeon cinemas were seen as comfortable and respectable (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The cinema-opening pace accelerated after Deutsch met the architect Harry Weedon (1887-1970) in 1932. Weedon had been in Birmingham making alterations to a factory run by Deutsch’s father Leopold and the cinema boss hired him to work on interiors for an Odeon in Warley, Staffordshire.

It was the start of a prolific partnership. They opened five new cinemas in 1933, and 16 the year after. Another 33 opened in 1936 – and the same again in 1937. Weedon expanded his team of six staff into an office employing 140. Turnarounds were fast.

Odeons became known for their art deco architecture, first used in the Odeon in Kingstanding to a design by Cecil Clavering, who worked for Harry Weedon. Clavering designed three further Odeons, at Sutton Coldfield, Colwyn Bay and Scarborough. They were seen as ‘one masterpiece after the other’ and they were considered ‘the finest expressions of the Odeon circuit style’.

Clavering stunned Weedon in 1935 when he resigned and moved to the Office of Works. Clavering was replaced by Robert Bullivant and Weedon was then commissioned by Deutsch to oversee the design of the entire chain.

The striking Kingstanding Odeon (1935) was followed by the flagship Odeon Cinema in Leicester Square, London, which opened in November 1937 with The Prisoner of Zenda. By 1937, there were 250 Odeon cinemas, making Odeon one of the three major cinema chains.

Although they went up fast, Deutsch’s cinemas were by no means slapdash. For many of the towns and cities around the Midlands and along the south coast, where most were built, they were the most exciting and modern pieces of architecture in the area.

Odeon cinemas were seen as more comfortable and respectable for middle-class filmgoers than those of the two other chains, Associated British Cinemas (ABC), which also used the Ritz name, and Gaumont-British Cinemas.

The former Odeon cinema in Oxford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

In his private life, Oscar Deutsch was also a pious Jew and a highly-regarded Jewish philanthropist in Birmingham and the Midlands. He was the President of the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation, Birmingham’s main synagogue on Singers Hill, from 1932 to 1940.

From 1935, he had his head office in London from 1935 and lived at the Dorchester Hotel. However each week he came home to Birmingham on Friday afternoons to be with his family, and to worship at Singers Hill Synagogue.

The grand synagogue, now a Grade II-listed building, underwent a refit in 1937 to expand its capacity under the guidance of Oscar Deutsch, who used his own cinema architect to remodel the interior. The synagogue was extended by the architect Harry Weedon, with Oscar Deutsch raising or donating much of the funds.

Singers Hill Synagogue in Birmingham … Oscar Deutsch was President of the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation from 1932 to 1940 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Deutsch was also a major financial backer of rebuilding and enlarging the Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue. The synagogue was reconsecrated by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Joseph Hertz, on 1 September 1937 and was formally opened by Oscar Deutsch.

As the Nazis tightened their grip on power in 1930s, Deutsch worked on behalf of Jewish refugees from Germany. He was a member of the management committee of Saint Mark’s Hospital, London, and the County Homes for Cancer.

A bomb landed on his home in 1941, he was blown out of bed and Oscar Deutsch never recovered. He died of cancer of the liver on 5 December 1941. Later, his widow Lily sold the Odeon chain to J Arthur Rank and it became part of the Rank Organisation, who also bought, but managed separately, Gaumont-British Cinemas. The Odeon cinema chain he founded remains Europe’s biggest.

The former Odeon cinema in York retains its distinctive architectural style (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Shabbat Shalom